Oh My! Sweet Potato Pie!

Hello my foodie friends! Today we’re going to make Sweet Potato Pie. For those of you who absolutely loathe sweet potatoes, I beg you to give this a try. I have never, at any point in my life, appreciated sweet potatoes. I don’t even remember why I baked a pie for the first time, years ago, using these orange fleshed tubers. But I can tell you that I don’t regret it and I make it every year, without fail because my mother might never forgive me if I didn’t.


Ingredients

1 (1 pound) sweet potato aka 2 cups of cooked sweet potato
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup milk
2 eggs
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 (9 inch) unbaked pie crust

We’re going to start off by getting our sweet potatoes prepped. Notice, I said ‘potatoes’. That’s because the first potato I have is less than a pound, and the other is a little over a pound, so today I’m going to double the recipe (and the leftover pie output), but I’m going to coach you through a single recipe.

So, we scrub the potato which should be a pound. Remember what I said when we did the pumpkins? We don’t want any of the nasties left on our cooked food product, so we always scrub the outside. We’re then going to take a fork and poke holes in the potato, all around it.

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Poking the Potatoes

Once that’s done, we’re going to lovingly wrap it up in foil and put it in the oven to bake at 400 degrees. It should only take about 45 minutes, but that depends on the thickness of your potato.

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Foil Wrapped Potatoes

It could take up to an hour for those ones that are short and squat rather than long and lean. At 45 minutes, poke your potato through the foil. Your fork or other poking device should slide through the potato without any resistance. If you find the potato fighting back, put it in the oven and cook it a little longer.

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Cooked Potato Cut in Half

Once the potato is done, we’re going to take it out of the oven and open the foil. Careful. The foil will be hot and the potato even hotter. I’m then going to use a knife to just cut it into a couple more pieces so it will cool faster. We don’t even have to touch the potato for this part really. Now we’re going to let it cool for about 20-30 minutes which means we can get back to that TV show we might have on.

After the potato has cooled, we’ll peel it and then cut the potato into pieces. Sweet potatoes have stringy meat like the pumpkins so let’s put it in our food processors or our Ninja blenders and whip it up into a puree which will gives us a nice, smooth pie. I’ll admit, I blended up my potatoes and then I threw in the butter and blended it some more. The potato puree came out nice and smooth and creamy! Once that is done, we’ll transfer our potato puree to the mixing bowl and if you didn’t put your butter into the food processor with the potato, that’s okay, go ahead and mix it in before moving on to the next step.

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Peeled Potatoes
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Potato Puree

Now we’re going to add in the in sugar, milk, eggs, nutmeg, cinnamon and vanilla and mix it well until everything is nice and smooth and all those spices are incorporated.

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All Ingredients

I’m using frozen pie shells because I’ll admit, I don’t have time, or the pie dishes, to make fresh pie shells because I bake, at minimum, half a dozen pies for my Thanksgiving dinner alone. This is so mom and dad have something to take home for their leftovers.

I always use the deep dish pie shells because I’d rather have a slightly under filled pie than leftover pie guts because the shell is full. I defrost my pie shells by letting them sit on the counter until they’re nice and soft, then I prick just a couple holes in the bottom of the pie shell with a fork so we don’t get any bubbles that Frankenstein our pie into having a weird growth of pie shell in the middle.

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Unbaked Pie

We now pour in our sweet potato guts and we put it on a cookie sheet, just in case it boils over, and put it in the oven at 350 for 55-60 minutes or until a knife in the middle comes out clean. My pies are always going to be slightly jiggly. Don’t worry. They will set up when they cool, so don’t get all crazy trying to get them to not jiggle in the oven to the point that you’ve burned them.

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Baked Pie

Now that our pie is done, we enjoy it with a dollop of homemade whipped cream.

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